A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The morning after Alice’s first magic seed experiment, she was in a good mood. She had finally made some progress towards making an artificial magic seed. She was still missing several things for a ‘full’ class seed, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to solve some of the problems she had… but she had a rough idea how to move forward, at least. She started out the day by filtering the rest of the levels she had gotten during her magic seed experiment. She had already filtered most of the mana she had gained in order to get her new Perks, but she had gained a bit more during the experiment on Jonathan.

You have leveled up!

Scholar: 70 -> 71, Careful Enchanter 40 -> 43

Alice didn’t get any other levels, but she was happy to see more progress for [Careful Enchanter] after only one evening of careful mana manipulation. After all, [Careful Enchanter] was starting to look like it might have a unique level of relevance in fixing the current crisis, and the Class had lagged far behind a lot of her other Classes. It didn’t benefit from some of her leveling speed boosters in her Achievements, but that didn’t mean Alice was happy with it being so far behind. She hoped it would at least start getting combined Perks soon, so that Alice would have another tool ready to help repair or replace the System.

Of course, that was far from the only progress Alice had. While she was in her dream library the previous night, she had also spent a bunch of time reviewing her own memories of the System, mana, and other mana constructs she had witnessed the creation of. And as she went back through her memories, she had noticed something that she had previously overlooked.

When Alice had observed someone survive their mana baptism, all those months ago, Alice had seen someone’s mage core ‘light up’ several. Alice had also noticed a similar ‘lighting up’ process when observing monsters transform into alphas, during the group’s journey to meet with Demor in Morendia. Since Alice had observed it twice, in two different spots, she suspected that it was important. The question was what, exactly, she had observed.

Alice suspected that what she saw was some sort of ‘finishing touch’ to magic cores, monster cores, and various other types of mana structure. Having seen her own attempt at making an artificial magic seed, and how it turned into a double helix, Alice knew that there were a lot of details about artificial magic seeds that she was missing. However, unlike before, she actually had a few guesses about what this meant.

Alice’s first guess was that artificial magic seeds would ‘light up’ once they became dense enough, or reached some sort of critical mass. Alternately, maybe it meant that something was ‘turned on,’ sort of like hitting a switch for a light. Alice felt that these two might be good directions to focus her research on, in order to hopefully finish her research on artificial magic seeds more quickly. The faster she got everything solved, the faster she could start genuinely helping people instead of sitting in her research lab while the world burned. Of course, Alice’s version of the System was still several steps behind the ‘original…’ but it was far better than no solution at all.

Of course, Alice’s guess that ‘density’ was what produced the flashing lights she saw in completed mana structures was a guess that lay on shaky foundations. At first glance, this would seem to make sense. After all, Alice knew that both newly forming mage cores and monster cores drew in huge amounts of mana when they were forming. Since magic and monster cores didn’t grow any larger in size, it would make sense to assume that the mana was being compacted into a denser and denser ball of mana for both types of mana-structure.

Unfortunately, magic didn’t always follow the laws of conservation of energy. Which meant that Alice might be completely off-base with that assumption. She just had to cross her fingers and hope that she was going in the right direction, and that the esoteric laws of magic weren’t going to screw her over at the worst possible time.

Alice mused on these thoughts as she went down to the floor level of the mansion, before getting a bowl of soup that was sitting just above a traditional campfire to stay warm. The soup was a bit cold, since it seemed like the others had finished eating before Alice woke, but it still tasted decent enough. According to Ethan, it was quite normal to have soup as a breakfast item in Morendia, although it struck Alice as a bit unusual, since Illvaria’s breakfast culture was similar to those from Alice’s homeland. Either way, tasted decent enough. It vaguely reminded of a traditional Polish soup she had once had when one of her mom’s friends had visited them, when Alice was younger. As Alice sat down with her bowl and started eating, she tried to think about her next steps. She was getting pretty close to the cooldown for {System’s Ambition}, and {Magic Modelling} was also almost ready to go. She had a few conflicting needs for what to use {Magic Modelling} on, and Alice hadn’t figured out the best direction for it. Using it on a Class seed would make sense, but she could also try using it on her own Mana Helix to get more detail on what she had created and how it worked.

As she was lost in thought, Cecilia returned to the mansion.

Alice gave her friend a nod as she strode into the entryway, while Cecilia quickly wandered over to the fire and gave the bowl of soup an experimental sniff. Then, deciding that it had earned her approval, Cecilia also grabbed herself a bowl, before sliding into a seat next to Alice.

“Hey. How have you been?” asked Cecilia, as she leaned back into her chair. Alice noticed that Cecilia seemed a little fatigued. Her eyes had dark circles under them, as if she had spent many sleepless nights focused on her surroundings, and Cecilia also seemed a bit… out of it.

“Things have been going fine on my end. I wouldn’t say things are perfect, but I’m making progress, even if I worry that it’s not fast enough. What about you? Did something happen? Why do you look so tired?” asked Alice. “Is your investigation taking up too much time and energy?”

“I am finding some of the news that I’ve been looking into to be rather… troubling,” said Cecilia. “There are a lot of things that don’t make sense.” Then, Cecilia paused for a moment, before turning back towards Alice. “Tell me about your investigation. I could use something to take my mind off of my own investigation for a while.”

Alice didn’t need to think for long before she nodded in agreement. Sometimes, an outside perspective could help one progress their research more effectively. “My experiments are going well,” she said. “I think. I’m having a hard time with a few important parts of setting up a proper Class seed, which is a problem. Here, let me show you.”

Cecilia held out her arm, and Alice gently grabbed her wrist and used {Shared Memory}. After that, Alice started taking Cecilia on a mental tour of all of her recent experiments. Alice showed Cecilia her attempts to make an artificial magic seed in Jonathan’s pinky toe, as well as her various speculations and experiments with stabilization mana and artificial magic seeds.

Cecilia looked over Alice’s memories, making an occasional ‘hmm’ as the two wandered through Alice’s memories. Finally, as Alice finished showing Cecilia what she had seen, Cecilia frowned.

“Your experiments are going a lot better than my attempts to investigate this area, at least,” said Cecilia, with a grimace. “It looks like you’re making steady progress, although I admit, I also have no idea how to solve some of your issues. It almost looks like you’re making mana itself into an enchanting material, and that’s not something I’ve ever thought of or heard of someone trying. Not to mention the need to make it work like a magic seed, instead of a regular enchantment.”

Alice nodded. “What about your investigation? Anything you can tell me?”

Cecilia sighed. “Just trying to figure out why the mana level is decreasing so much in this area. It’s very frustrating. I’ve learned that a lot of people believed that this area had a low quantity of mana, at least in comparison to its neighbors. However, most people believed that the mana level was increasing over time. Logically, that should have made the mana level rise, right? Because their beliefs would have influenced the area and caused reality to reflect their beliefs. So why is it going down, instead?”

“Is it just going down relative to its neighbors, maybe?” asked Alice. “It could be a case of other countries just facing mana inflation while this one stagnates, or sits at a stable level of mana.”

“No, it’s definitely decreasing. I checked with a few Mages who had mana-measuring Perks that can hit much larger areas. The average level of mana in this country has decreased by about 10% over the past two months. Most of them haven’t even talked about their findings with many other people – after all, with all the other chaos in the area, decreasing mana levels is hardly a source of interest. In other times, Mages and [Nobles] would probably be very worried about mana levels dropping… but with swarms everywhere, natural catastrophes erupting in the area, and class-mana related illnesses cropping up left and right, nobody is paying attention. Some people are worried that there won’t be enough mana for people to survive anymore, but it looks like your paper has made at least some rounds in Morendia too. A lot of [Scholars] are arguing that the mana levels dropping to nothing won’t result in mass deaths because of that. In addition, there’s another faction of [Scholars] that believe that while mana is still necessary for human life, it’s not dropping fast enough to be a real threat. Instead, they want to focus on the monster swarms and class mana driving people mad.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Alice frowned.

Cecilia’s findings might not have attracted much attention here, but they were certainly odd. If Cecilia’s findings were correct, mana level in the country should have been consistently rising. Why was it decreasing?

Alice started searching through her own memories and understanding of the System and mana… but absolutely none of her memories seemed related to this situation. The only thing she could think of was that monsters in this area might have eaten all of the mana… but that didn’t seem like it made sense. If there were enough monsters to eat all of the mana in this area, surely towns and cities would have already started to collapse? If there were enough strong monsters to consume that much mana in this area, the country wouldn’t have been in a position to receive Alice, Ethan, Allira, and Jonathan. They would have been begging for help as the last few cities in the country fell into ruin. Heck, the last city the group had seen before reaching Morendia had been in exactly that situation. Something was very wrong here.

Alice paused. Was it relevant? If she focused on her own research, would it result in a better, or worse outcome? Alice was already starved for time, mana, and Perk uses. Every single second she wasted was a second she could have spent solving problems. Was it really a good idea to focus too much on Cecilia’s investigation?

On the other hand, if there was some sort of imminent danger in the area, Alice needed to know now. That way, she could either defuse the threat before it exploded… or flee back to Illvaria. Something about the situation in Morendia struck her as off. Alice wasn’t sure if this was a time bomb that would explode and kill her or not… but taking her own safety seriously was also important. Alice was the only one that could replace the System, as far as she knew, and on a personal level Alice really didn’t want to die, either. Besides, right now she was still stuck for ideas on how to fix all the ‘flashing lights’ problem that her artificial magic seeds were encountering. Even if Alice was hoping that cramming more mana into a magic seed would solve that problem, she didn’t have the mana to try it yet, and Alice was more than a little worried she might be missing something. Perhaps investigating this new phenomenon a bit would help give her more inspiration for how to proceed. Right now, Alice desperately needed a push to help her get through the final stretch of her research.

“Let’s go outside for a while,” said Alice. “I want to take a look myself.”

Cecilia nodded. After the two finished breakfast, Alice let Allira know that the she was going out to get some fresh air and investigate the disappearing mana in the country. Allira nodded, and gestured towards a few nearby shadows, before all of those shadows wriggled over to Alice’s legs and then seemed to disappear. After that, Alice double checked to make sure that she was still wearing Doll’s armor. Then, Alice headed back down the stairs to talk with Cecilia again.

“Do you have any contacts, or people you have been consulting with? It would be a good idea to start there,” said Alice.

“Yeah, I have a few Mages who said they wouldn’t mind speaking with Ethan, or an expert on the topic,” said Cecilia. “If you want to meet up with some of them, [Scholar] Metista said that she’s willing to chat with me again if I have new thoughts on the subject or questions. I know where her house is, so we could start there?”

Alice nodded. With their destination decided, the two stepped out of the mansion. Alice was exposed to fresh air for the first time in over a week.

Alice took in a breath of fresh air, and felt herself relax. Even if she didn’t love the outdoors much, the occasional breath of fresh air wasn’t bad. She could feel some of the stress and worry in her thoughts start to melt away. She was still very aware of how much she had to do, and how many things depended on her… but they felt less like all-consuming, crushing pressure that would grind her to dust if she didn’t keep moving forward.

After that, Alice switched to her mana vision and frowned.

In the past week, while she had been experimenting, she hadn’t paid very much attention to the nearby mana. After all, it Demor’s mansion had plenty of mana inside of it. It was the home of an Immortal focused on enchantments. There were so many small enchantments layered throughout the hallways and basement that Alice could basically always see a bit of mana here and there. Demor certainly didn’t have a hard time paying for the monster cores to keep everything running.

But once she stepped outside, it became obvious that the level of mana had dropped, and not just by a little bit. It looked almost as if the mana were on the verge of completely vanishing. It wouldn’t happen overnight, of course – but if this continued, Alice wasn’t sure if mana would still be in Morendia in a year or two. Maybe the mana would disappear even faster than that, if the monster population increased or something else drained the mana from the area. Alice… had no idea what to make of that.

Alice sighed, before she shook her head. “This really is weird,” she said. “Let’s go meet up with that [Scholar] you mentioned.”

Cecilia nodded, and the group made their way out of the area near Demor’s mansion. They didn’t see many people along the way, since Demor had a large, enclosed manor. However, after they passed the boundary of Demor’s land and made their way into the city proper, the number of people started to increase. Alice tried not to notice how many people seemed to be caught up in their own particular brand of madness. Some were trying to sow seeds in the middle of the street in broad daylight, while others were hammering nothing with a [Blacksmith’s] hammer. A few weeks ago, Alice had seen some amount of madness, but it was mostly contained. Most people had still been in control of their mental faculties, and the cities had still seemed mostly safe and controlled. If someone fell into Class madness, there had been avenues to seek help so that their family members could get them to a controlled environment and keep them safe.

Now, order was beginning to break down. People in the streets were starting to fall into class madness, and instead of being rushed to a facility to help take care of them, they were just surrounded by more mad people. Alice could even see a few corpses. It looked like the corpses were people who had fallen victim to their own class madness, and forgotten to eat or drink in the process. Alice shuddered, and then moved towards a few of the more severe patients, before helping them filter their Class mana. She needed to keep most of her mana for experiments, but she also felt intense guild when she saw these people dying and didn’t do anything to help. As she helped a few people, she noticed that the situation wasn’t quite as bad as she had first thought.

There were a few other people roaming the streets, trying to help those who were afflicted, but those helpers were running into problems of their own. It looked like they were being quickly enveloped by layers of some kind of healing-related Class mana. Unlike the other afflicted, Alice couldn’t even do anything to help them. Most of them didn’t have a Class seed for her to stuff all of their mana into. Most of them were covered in several variations of [Doctor] or [Healer] mana. As she saw that, Alice started to realize why this particular art of the System’s collapse was so sinister. Even helping other people would make you a new victim of the collapse.

Even more concerning, Alice seriously doubted that many of the people on the street, or the helpers, would be shaken out of their stupor. She only had so much mana she could spend helping, and she only had so many people she could focus on at once. There were always going to be limits to what Alice could do alone. Besides, starvation and dehydration weren’t the only threats here. At this point, even if monsters waltzed up to them and started eating, the people probably wouldn’t notice. After all, these people couldn’t even be roused by their thirst or hunger. Would being eaten really rouse them?

In Morendia, there weren’t many monsters to worry about. The disappearance of mana in the area was concerning, but at the very least, it meant that almost no monsters were present nearby. They simply couldn’t survive in this kind of environment. For the first time, Alice started thinking in a different direction. If this drop in mana was artificial in nature… maybe there was a way to replicate it? If Alice could just suck mana out of the rest of the planet, it would solve the class mana problem and the monster swarm problem. However, even though it seemed like it might be a good idea, she needed to know more first. A blessing in disguise that was poorly understood might also be the herald of something far more dangerous.

As Alice stewed in her thoughts and worries, the two arrived at a reasonably nice-looking house. Some of the maintenance looked like it had fallen off over the past month or two, but that was to be expected, times being what they were. Cecilia knocked on the door a few times, and then waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Alice started to get a bad feeling in her stomach. “Does she usually take this long to come to the door?” she asked.

Cecilia frowned, and shook her head. “She doesn’t. I was speaking with her less than two hours ago. I know for a fact that she said she was going to head home. Maybe she left to go do something?”

A shadow peeled out from under Alice’s feet, before it glanced at the home of [Scholar] Metista. Then, the shadow seemed to notice something. It slid under the door to Metista’s house. Alice and Cecilia waited for a few more minutes, before the door slid open. There, just inside of the house’s entryway, was a patch of fresh-looking bloodstains, and signs of a struggle. The interior of the house was thrown into disarray, and there was no sign of the [Scholar] Alice and Cecilia had set out to meet.

“Shit,” said Cecilia.